Black aesthetics and the interior life /

Freeburg (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) rereads personhood, which is neither black nor white, and which, despite external coercion, cannot be destroyed. He points out that though a person may be "objectified," a person cannot be made an object. For example, Freeburg demonstrates that the title character of Ralph Ellison's first novel, Invisible Man (1952), is not "invisible" to anyone but his victimizers. Thus, he argues that readings of blackness must entail the recognition of the victories of the inner life, no matter how abhorrent the treatment of the physical body. Freeburg writes that black heroes "answer to no one individual or collective group moment in history." Black heroes "demonstrate the fact of an always and never-ending reality of personhood and the ongoing movement of personalizing." Freeburg rereads major writers--Ellison, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and others--and also less-familiar authors, revealing the presence and durability of self in the victims of slavery and racism. This lyrical and simultaneously scholarly reassessment of victimization advances the understanding and nuances of racism and calls for a recognition of the self that has been ignored in the reading of black characters. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Loretta L. Johnson, Lewis & Clark College